RecruitingTools.com » Strategy

Boolean Search Strings and Life

MagicSourcer — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 00:53:58 +0000

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This post has been contributed by Sarang Brahme

Earlier today I was delivering a Boolean Training session for our new members in the sourcing team. My aim was to simplify the Boolean concept for sourcing. Often it is mistaken that “Boolean” is very scientific and relatively tough which is why people tend to ignore. Finally – I found the connection!!! Very simple and life-like (!)…

I took an example of life and how the sourcing of candidates is very similar to our life. In life, our choices are the keywords and we either choose to go ahead with them OR drop them. Right choices bring expected results and if we do not put them in right order – it all messes up.

Sounding familiar to how we build search strings in sourcing?

Let’s look at each Boolean operator

AND

We keep adding many variables into our life to try to make it perfect.

Money AND happiness AND satisfaction AND “work-life balance” AND fun AND adventure AND hobbies.

Very little we realize – more AND’s we put in this search; lesser the results will be.

It’s more important to use combination of these at right times. That is a best way to extract most out of life. Do not restrict your search results!!!

One of the most important operators from the list!!

It is imperative that we look out for alternate options if your desired variable is not available at the particular time. We waste lot of time waiting at something which may not be available. It is better we look for alternative ways to progress.

Work Satisfaction = Money OR passion OR dedication OR enthusiasm OR excellence

We tend to forget that if we excel in what we believe – money will follow!!

Perfect substitute??

NOT

Sometimes we need to draw a boundary and should not go beyond our own limits. When you know what you can not compromise on – it’s really easy to filter it out to get your desired results.

Money AND fame AND satisfaction AND love NOT unethical

Even though you say “No Strings Attached”, these strings bind you together as one unit. These variables build your character (read resume) and help you to grow as a mature person (read grow in your career).

All our life we shuffle across various search strings with time and condition using different combination of choices (keywords). Our aim is to get perfect life.

What we forget however is just like “There is no such thing as perfect search string”; you can not have a “Perfect Life”. Learn to use AND, OR and NOT at right time, at right place with right keywords.

Have fun with your search strings!!!!

Talent Communities are great. The Recruiters Suck

admin — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 03:58:42 +0000

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Engagement. What is it? What does it mean? And how do you measure it? It’s a tough question, and I will jump to say that the vast majority of companies, corporate or vendor based running a form of social campaign

have no clue.

The last few years have seen corporate talent operations engulf social media or “social recruiting” (Google has no definition) as the only absolute in their organization. I want to be clear that I am a firm believer in social and 2^nd generation connecting for the purpose of talent acquisition. But I am a bigger fan of process and meaningful connecting. I talk about it a bit here in the 4 c’s, Engagement and the Electronic Exchange.

This past week I was a silent participant in a recruiting conversation offline that opened my eyes to how dangerously clueless a lot of recruiting leaders are. (Silent as I sat in but remained quiet)

This is a serious problem that will only lead to greater failures. These are large mega companies with billion dollar brands and trillion dollar dreams. Companies that on the surface have elegantly articulated the process for their talent community but have genuinely failed at any backend process that would be recognized as mediocre.

The conversation was around engagement and metrics within the talent community. What do we need to measure and how do we measure it? The companies will 100% remain anonymous and I will not share the participants, but I will share a few good things that came out of the call.

Building and measuring a talent community are 2 separate challenges. How to measure and what metrics “we” (collectively) need and/or want to measure:

Engagement: Engagement was defined as how the organization would approach potential prospects or visitors to the named landing page or community page. Some ideas included activities, contests, give a ways and so on. The end result was an agreement that the engagement must consist of a way to attract potential talent; which I agree with.

The question posed was: What metrics you currently use to measure return on engagement activities? Though I felt this could have been a deeper conversation here are the notes that I gathered during the call.

Metrics to monitor when assessing the return on your talent community efforts: (Not an exhaustive list but a few to get the conversation started):

Content: Content is king and the king will always win. Great content generates great engagement. Though I agree with this there was no serious breakout of what great content is. I am not even sure you can label great content. Great content is in perspective of the reader. My feeling is that you need to understand your target audience and why they are visiting your site or reading your content.

It’s important to understand your goal and have a clearly defined plan on how you will get there and how you will navigate around the roadblocks that will arise. And arise they will.

Content tracking can be accomplished rather quickly and easily with programs like Google Analytics but study these before you choose. There are others that will fit your specific needs better than the standard free applications.
Tracking stickiness: how long a reader was reading your content and how many click thru’s they had during their visit. Did they click 1 article or 4? And which article where they? Were they related to the entrance point they came through to get onto your site or did you entice them to read additional articles that are not related to the original reason they visited your work? Another nice tool I find helps is Yahoo’s Index Tools.
Content Downloads: i.e. whitepapers, research, abstracts. Did you convert the visitor into a candidate? A visitor is a prospect. Do not be fooled by your statistics telling you that you had 600 visitors today but 50 where unique and you only had 5 downloads of the content you wanted to push out.
Measure Subscriptions to your community and to your links or feeds. There are free and paid services. I prefer some of the the paid for tracking details however you can always use free services like a mailchimp (to an extent) but a very strong service or you use an open source like PhP if you can handle it on your own.

A career blog for example that has 17,000 subscribers looks good, but is it relevant? This is the same argument as being a top 10 connector on LinkedIn. What does this get you? Access to more people? On the surface yes, but relevance..not a chance in hell. We’ll discuss that in another post, but you can read bit on relevance at Boolean Blackbelt and Glen’s post on LinkedIn’s Competitive advantage.

Target your network accordingly. If you are focused on sales recruiting than have a plan to target your top prospects (companies not individuals) and work out a way to effectively convert them into a candidate.

Recruiter return is a serious metric that without fail needs to be measured, tracked and monitored. Your recruiters are the face of your organization. Their attitude tells the story. Their ability to effectively articulate the message decides whether or not the prospect is converted into a candidate.

I will leave on the note of “recruiter return” and tackle that in the next installment.

People Search with Zoominfo

admin — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 21:05:34 +0000

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Sourcing for candidates can be simple or it can be frustrating. Putting aside the intricacies of deep web searching this series will be dedicated to listing and explaining some best practices around leveraging people search tools to find and attract great talent. First, let me start by saying that there are obviously thousands of applications that are available to mine HC (human capital data).

Choosing the proper application can only be done by you using what you feel comfortable with.

The tools that I’ll be sharing will not require you to be a super duper sourcing hero. I hope you enjoy. Please share your best tools and practices if you like the tools.

Tool #1: Zoominfo

(Paid – but you can use it free via site searching to an extent) – Sure, it’s the standard and most everyone knows about the tool, but there is a reason for that. It’s good. In essence it’s deep aggregate of HC data that allows you to effectively source data and competitive intel form target companies including sales info, but more important prospect information of potential talent for your organization.

I’ve been using Zoominfo for a couple of years now to uncover talent that I could probably find otherwise, but possibly not as quick without spending valuable time searching.

Why I like Zoominfo:

1. The key is the relevance to the results set provided. The info is concise and package extremly well.

2. You are provided with the sources from which the intel was gathered from for your review. This is obviously a great soruce to have for further research and tracking

3. SImilar to Hoovers and Yahoo finace among others, your given suggestions and information around key intel such as finances, competitors and stake holders.

4. Leveraging the free version, you really do get a significant amount of free data that you can than cross reference.

Here’s an example:

1. Try a very basic Site search via Google to target specific titles / companies etc. You can also go directly to Zoominfo and play with their search features. I tend to have better results through Google. Also try yahoo and bing etc. to be sure you are maximizing all results sets.

2. See the set of results showing “software engineers” from Microsoft

3. Full profile and breakdown of sources of information on potential candidates

Now certainly you can get deeper with the results set as you hone in on your search. As you play with the tool be sure to try the search capabilities internal to the application as well.

Subscribe HERE to stay up to date with our people search series

#Recruiting with Google Tools To Save Time

SourcerKelly — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 20:00:32 +0000

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In October I spoke at ProjectSAME (for you outside the DC Metro area that it the Staffing Alliance of Maryland Employers). The presentation was focused on my adjustment to my new work life as a Strategic Recruiting Manager after my former life as Technical Writer and Sourcing Researcher. And of course, paramount to this discussion was tools. Because now I’m in the throes of managing candidates, their profiles, contact and more. And to be honest, time is precious.

But Google helps, immensely.

Here’s my Core 4 that help me get my job done and I’d be lost without:

Chrome: If you’ve read anything I’ve ever written, you know I’m a nut about Chrome. I have about 5 extensions that I use regularly: Bit.ly, LightShot, See Google Similar Pages, ChromedBird, and ChromeIn. I only use IE now because of icims or the occasional webinar that requires it. That’s the only reason. When I can drop it forever I will.

Bookmarks: I used to believe in hyper organizing my bookmarks. But now I have 5 main folders:

Directories – have more than 200 just 60 days into the gig, so they earned a bookmark of their own
Team (that’s my team…data specific to their individual needs)
Search Strings (Templates stored first, favorites and works in progress fall in line)
Resources
Social Media Niche (I’m constantly on the hunt for niche sites…this helps me track them)

Docs: Brian Solis has a great quote… “Keep It Simple and Shareable” and that fits my team to a T. We have increased our review time and eliminated about a 100 emails a day just by sharing information via the cloud. It’s a beautiful thing.

Custom Search Engines: These are amazing. If you don’t know how to create one, go get training on how. The ability to target my search across select competitors, or industry organizations, or social networks or whatever is huge. And I don’t have to deal with all the other random results I’m not interested in. Completely friendly to all of Google’s unique operators too.

I’m sure there will be items that I tweak and drop over time. Part of my job is to figure out how I can get the most done in the least amount of time. And where free is available and quality is top notch, I’m there.

Check out Google Bookmarks “How To” **Note: This is not a recruiting example so you’ll have to relate this to recruiting**

How #Recruiters are generating 100′s of organic and targeted visits to their Joblog

admin — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 01:00:17 +0000

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I recently received a question around document sharing sites. What are they can they be used in recruitment? What is the return? Though doc sharing sites were not developed for recruitment you can certainly reap the benefits of their obnoxious growth.

Here is how I use a few key sites for recruitment myself.

Challenge: I went out and bought a cool domain name to advertise jobs and openings but I get little response. This social media stuff sucks.

This is a great start, and if you are using wordpress among others you’ll get some kick organic traffic if you post on a regular basis. But what if you can take your internal knowledge, post it to the masses, and direct that traffic directly to your job openings?

It’s simple to do. Here is a very brief overview of how you can approach this tactic.

Decide what who your target audience is and what content they are searching. You can use research tools such as Google Wonder Wheel, Onet or Google Insight. Run you searches, take note of commonalities and build your targets.
Now that you’ve completed some due diligence take that information and make use of it. People in industry love to read about their respective careers. That means anything of relevance that is good content will be read. Create a small 2 page essay on a specific technology, case study, industry news or happenings. Create a “how to” or a reference list. Keep it brief and then PDF it for free with services like openoffice or youconvertit or others like adobe.
Make sure your content is “re-tweetable”. In today’s world if it cannot be re-tweted or updated on a friends status it’s changes of being read on minimal. You can find great topics in your industry right in your inbox, from conversations with hiring managers, the questions candidates are asking you in the phone screens, upcoming conferences. Convert these questions into topics and write about them.
The final step is to share it with your audience. Forget making it viral. Your audience is not viral. Your hiring managers are looking for a specific candidate, not all of YouTube. There are many doc sharing apps and sites, but I like to use scibd or docstoc among a few other lesser known tools. These sites will send you hundreds of targeted visitors if your content is direct and targeted.

The only other thing that you need to do is include your contact info and push it out as hard as you can. Ask your friends to share it, re-tweet it, run adwords and so forth.

Take this content, triplicate it and post it often on your blog. The more you post the more traffic you will get. We’ll follow this up with creating your job blog to target your candidates.

Check out some of these examples that I like from Jim Stroud of TheRecruitersLounge.com

e-books / publications that drive large tartegted audiences.

Which resume sourcing tool should I use?

Twittering Recruiters

How to find 100′s of hidden jobs with the The Hidden Job Report

admin — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 11:38:12 +0000

Once in a great while something comes along in our industry that is just so good it needs to be pushed out to the masses. This is one of those times. The Hidden Job Report is a new service that job seekers and recruiters can use to find hidden jobs on the Internet.

TheHiddenJobReport.com is a brain trust idea of Jim Stroud and company that simply reveals “hidden” jobs that are not published on the boards or on the company’s career section. How can this be? It’s simple actually but what’s even better is that TheHiddenJobReport is aggregating these jobs from all over the hidden web and bringing them to the masses.

Use the information s you may, leads for business development for your recruiting business or better yet to make key connections to find yourself a new job before the hiring spree actually kicks off.

Here’s a little video on the service to find hidden jobs.

There are a lot of new services to find and aggregate job postings on the Internet. I wanted to share this one, as it has a unique way of finding hidden jobs, which is something that isn’t addressed much by regular job boards.

Top 10 HR and Recruiting Apps with HRE Online

admin — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 12:28:38 +0000

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HR and Recruitment technology is at the forefront of our industry today. From mobile apps to enterprise based systems for tracking and data warehousing there are new products to learn about each and every day.

This past week Kenexa (Disclaimer: The company I work for and this is unpaid) was honored in the HRE editorial Top HR Apps. You can see their article in full here and I recommend that you take a look at it to learn more about the tools that are available.

Kenexa recently released Kenexa 2x Mobile. It’s specifically designed for iPhone and Blackberry and of course more compatibility to come. The crux of the system is that hiring managers can approve job reqs and final say on hiring’s anywhere, anytime. You can read much more on 2x Mobile here.

The other top contenders listed were: (From the HRE release)

Rypple , Toronto is a web-based, Software-as-a-Service application that is designed to provide managers with better visibility into the performance and activities of employees..

Kenexa 2x Mobile is an application designed for the iPhone and BlackBerry (with Android and iPad apps planned for 2011) that allows hiring managers to approve job requisitions and hirings no matter where they are.

Saba , Redwood Shores, Ca. is a performance-feedback tool that opens the process to all co-workers and expands the time frame from once or twice a year to every moment of every day. It uses a Twitter-like platform that enables individuals across the organization to enter comments, regardless of reporting structure.

Accero Workforce Intelligenc , Lake Oswego, Ore. is a reporting and analytics tool designed to quickly uncover actionable HR information.

Voice Advantage HarQen , Milwaukee is a candidate-interview program that lets recruiters use their phones and a simple web-based dashboard to create and distribute custom, recorded phone interviews.

Power Resume Search Monster Worldwide , Maynard, Mass. is a new technology that can help recruiters find the most qualified candidates when searching Monster’s immense database.

Aquire Inc ., Irving, Texas is a hierarchy-driven workforce-analytics solution that provides trend analysis, talent-management measurement and scorecard metrics for HR executives to align workforce analytics with a company’s strategic goals.

Jobvite , Burlingame, Calif. is a social-networking application that focuses on referrals to promote jobs and find qualified candidates. Jobvite uses propriety matching technology to source, match and recruit candidates using employee referrals, social networks, such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, and web searches.

mResource , Chicago Mobile Talent 2.0 is an interactive text and mobile web platform that enables organizations to use cell-phone texting and mobile web applications in the recruiting process. Job candidates opt in to the service — which organizations can promote on corporate or external career job sites or on social media.

Englishtown Inc ., Hong Kong is an online program designed to teach students how to speak, read, write and understand English. Its interactive approach offers a variety of learning activities that mix and match sounds, words, letters, pictures, games and videos.

Like This! 10 Ways to Optimize Your Facebook Like Page

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 17:03:10 +0000

I get emails and calls daily asking how can I use Facebook for recruiting? Well, it’s not always about recruiting when using “social tools” like Facebook. Social tools are also about getting found yourself – Facebook pages are a way to do this.

Recruiters should pay attention to Facebook, because almost everyone is on it. It’s a great way to connect with friends and colleagues. However, good recruiters know that your best candidates are one in the same with your friends and colleagues. Neworking within your personal circle is a great way to find strong candidates that you can put your trust in. So more and more, Facebook is a great way to get more business. Optimizing your Facebook page is one step in the process.

Besides searching for candidates on Facebook and reaching out to people you know or used to know, it’s also important to optimize your own Facebook page. Here are a few tips to optimize your Facebook page and get people to find YOU:

Let people find you from other sources. Link to your Facebook page from your Linkedin profile, website, email, or other ways that you communicate with people.
Get the word out: tell your friends to tell their friends about your page and that you are interested in finding them jobs. If you have any kind of social circle, this will quickly get a lot of people calling you to use your recruiting services or just get career advice. Ask your friends to also link to your Facebook page on their website or other services.
Do you have a company video? Add it to your Facebook page. You want to keep your page professional but still interesting and engaging.
Be conscious of keywords when you are writing text for your pages. Realize that candidates and other people find you through the text that you write. Think about strong keywords for your profession. Do you recruit software developers? Write text about programming languages and typical jobs that you recruit for. This has an added benefit of making you appear informed and relevant to the industry that you are recruiting for.

On any social recruiting effort, make sure that before you use these different systems, you should have well developed professional profile. On Facebook, that means having an optimized Facebook page. Have fun and happy Facebook recruiting!

22 Tutorials and Insight Posts on #Recruiting with #Linkedin

admin — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 11:30:50 +0000

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Top LinkedIn Sourcing Posts from RecruitingTools.com and some of our friends:

Sourcing and Video Tutorials:

These tutorials were gathered from various sites including RecruitingTools.com, BooleanBlackbelt and StaffBytes.

Articles about LinkedIn (Links direct to Arbita’s blog. Great info and resources.)

Here is the direct link to Arbita’s LinkedIn page: http://aces.arbita.net/LinkedIn

#SocialRecruiting for College Grads just got Easier

admin — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:17:30 +0000

Disclaimer: This is not a sponsored post, but a reference article about social recruiting for college grads. CollegeRecruiter has been a client of our company before however.

Riddle me this: What has more than 17 million candidates with more than 10 million active and graduating students and more than 7 million recent grads wanting to work for you? Or maybe this: What has hundreds of thousands of entry level jobs and internships waiting for you to see?

I asked Steven Rothberg and he proudly told me CollegeRecruiter.com. Have you heard of it? If not, you might not want to admit that. It’s been around since 1991 and recently has gone through facelift to emphasize social recruiting for college grads. I had lunch with Steven a short while ago and we spoke about what the evolution of job boards and social integration into the name termed “social communities”

You may have received an email from Steven and his group this past weekend but if not I encourage you to goes check out their new digs. It’s packed with video, reference material and candidates.

Pros:

Companies targeting college students or recent grads have the opportunity to create sub groups to court potential talent.
It’s built on the NING network which is fast, reliable and allows for complete interaction between employers, recruiters and candidates.
Video is plentiful and the resource section for college students and employers is overstock with great info.
Employers can have a “spotlight” page advertising your brand to your target audience.

Cons:

I wish I had this when I graduated
I wish I had that massive database of candidates to source from on my pc
I wish this was my idea

Didn’t receive the email? No worries, here it below:

We just re-launched CollegeRecruiter.com and I guarantee you it is radically different from just about any “job board” you have ever seen! Our web site always did have thousands of white papers and blogs for students, recent grads and employers. But now? Now we are offering so much more:

Our new Web 2.0 site emphasizes user generated content and facilitates interaction between job seekers, employers, career counselors, and others. At the same time, we have preserved the ability for job seekers to search and apply to your job posting ads.
Candidates will now search for jobs, click on posting summaries, and immediately be taken to your web site to both read the posting and apply to it. Think Google, where you search Google and then go to the third party site to read the information.
Candidates can post profiles on our site and you may review those and contact the candidates directly — at no charge.
We anticipate that we will continue to see hundreds of thousands of unique monthly visitors per month from our primary target markets of job seekers and employers but we will now also see significant use and great content from college career service office professionals, career counselors, resume writers, admissions counselors and more.
We’ve built hundreds of Employer Spotlight pages for the top employers of college students and recent grads. The current job openings of those employers will automatically appear on those Spotlight pages … even if the employer has not paid us to do so. Realistically, most candidates who come to CollegeRecruiter.com don’t know about your opportunities so they’re unlikely to go first to your Spotlight page. They’re more likely to run a job search by entering their location, desired job title, and other keywords. If you want your postings to come up at the top of the search results, which is necessary get a good response rate, post your jobs to CollegeRecruiter.com and therefore also our network of thousands of complimentary niche career sites.
Video, video, video! Employers and other users may post videos at no charge, helping them better connect with job seekers. Want to do this today? Go to your Employer Spotlight page or create one of your own if we do not yet have one for you and copy the embed code for your videos on YouTube etc. and paste it into the Spotlight page.

It seems like a great new tool for college recruiting, and I like that it uses social recruiting ideas to approach this demographic. Let me know your thoughts about CollegeRecruiter and if you have had luck sourcing college grads using other social recruiting methods.